What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I took another water sample, and they are collecting it this morning for analysis. It's part of what Naperville is doing to monitor water quality, and it's always nice to get the reports back and make sure I'm not drinking "bad" water.

The City drops off liter-sized bottles, and picks them up, and sends the results... what could be easier? I'm sure there are folks that think this is annoying, but it's just a really great perk to me. 🙂

This morning Google finally shut down third-party access to GTalk - basically, the Pidgin protocol users, and that included Adium, the multi-protocol IM client that I've been running for a long time. True, Google has created a Chat app for iOS/iPadOS, and that allows me to stay in contact with folks that are still on GTalk, but it's sad to see the openness of the IM space shrink to the point of insignificance.

Adium used to be able to handle ICQ, Yahoo, Talk, AOL IM, Twitter, Facebook IM, but one by one, those have all shut down, and Talk was the last one. Sad to see it go. But it was the last Intel-based app I ran on my MacBook Pro, so now it's native Apple Silicon apps... which is something.

Ever since moving to my new M1Max MacBook Pro, and moving to Apple Silicon apps, I've had one bug in VoodooPad 6 that's a touch annoying. I mean it's not horrible, but it was something that I hoped would be fixed. So I decided to let them know about it.

With the pandemic, and VoodooPad now being owned by Primate Labs, they haven't had someone to do all the upgrades and improvements that they'd planned, and I understand that completely. Times are challenging for everyone, and they want to update the app, they just don't have the people to do it right now, so it has to wait a little.

Thankfully, they responded, and seem to know what the issue was - adding support for Dark Mode, which is kinda odd, but I guess I don't know any of the inner workings of the codebase, or how Dark Mode support is handled, so I'll have to just be patient, and wait for them to update the app as they have time.

But it would be really nice to be able to save text colors... 🙂

It's another Pi Day! And that always brings back memories of when the kids were little and the teachers in their elementary school would have the kids bring in pies for snacks, and fun, and while it's certainly a geeky thing to do, I always enjoyed that the kids loved it. Get them interested in things like that early, and maybe it'll make school seem more interesting.

Another year has passed, and another birthday arrives. As time passes, it's interesting that my birthday and the end of the year coincide, a time to think about the end of both, and the start of new things. It's been a year of ups and downs, the second year of the pandemic, and in many cases, so little has changed. In other ways, so much has changed.

A friend asked me to think about writing down how change happens from the inside, versus what's visible from the outside, and I mentioned that I thought it would be a very short story:

• Don't let yesterday ruin your today
• Don't hold today hostage for the promise of tomorrow
• Focus on just this moment, it's all we have, and it is more than enough.
• Do your best, all the time, and whatever happens - you know you couldn't have done more

This is what I've distilled my recovery down to... it's not a lot of big changes, in fact, it's not any really big changes at all. It's the almost imperceptible layering of millions of little things, that when viewed, occasionally, from the outside - appear as changes, but at the time they happen, it's really just sticking to one of the four tenets.

Every day is exactly the same... and I am blessed. 🙂

It's another Christmas, and things have started out quietly... I was able to finish Advent of Code today - all 25 Days in 25 days. It's an unusually warm Christmas - so no snow, but that's not really unusual, but the temps being as warm as they are is a little odd. Still... the temps will fall, and the snow will come, and it'll be time to shovel snow, but for now it's just like an extended Fall.

The Christmas Music has been great this year, and I've enjoyed some really good Christmas Movies. I wrote a Christmas Letter yesterday and sent it to extended family, and it seemed to be appreciated. I like catching folks up with a little humor. 🙂

Life goes on.

I just got Day 19 of Advent of Code, and it was brutal... I mean yes, the concept of change of axes, and then translation - that's not horrible, and while getting the individual translations right took a little time, the fact was, it worked, and I found the overlaps. What came next was the real challenge - Searching was not going to work.

This is not something new, as it's often that Part 1 is something that's reasonably direct, and can be solved directly, but Part 2 adds a much larger scope, and so can't really be solved in the same way. Not always... but often enough, that it didn't surprise me. So I knew I needed to thin the search space - I just didn't know I'd have to remove it entirely, and come up with an "execution plan" for the work.

Thankfully, I expect each translation to need the working rotation function, and offset so that once I had two sensor data matched, I could then move any point on one sensor to the other. But I then needed a faster way to find the overlaps, and then an order with which to collect all the beacon locations.

As it turns out, the unique set of inter-beacon distances is a nice "fingerprint" for a sensor data list, and we can use that to identify the "pairs" of sensors that overlap. Then it's the matter of order of mapping - and there we had to start at 0 and work up. If the pair had a sensor that we'd already mapped, then add it, and put it in the list. If not, put it at the back of the list, and try again. Eventually, all the pairs will be put in order, forming a chain of translations.

To get this, I worked on so many variations it's crazy. I easily spent over 10 hours on this day's puzzle. But in the end, the feeling of seeing the quick response was just fantastic! 🙂

It's December again, and that means 25 days of some of the funniest, most frustrating coding problems of the year. Yes, Advent of Code is back, and it'll be interesting to see how things work out. I will confess that today's problem wasn't too bad, but that's how the month always starts out. 🙂

We will see how things progress as we go through the month, but it's always fun to play along with the puzzles as they put you in the middle of the action to help Santa and the elves. It just makes me smile.

I just got back from getting my Moderna 6-month COVID booster, and I was a touch nervous - the Walgreen's website made it seem like all the data collection and ID verification was going to be done before I got there - but things rarely turn out as well as that. So when I got there, and needed to do some paperwork, I wasn't really surprised.

Still... it wasn't too bad, and it didn't take long for the pharmacist to take care of the gal before me in line, and then me. Pretty standard stuff. Given that Thanksgiving is this week, and I'm going to be visiting family in Indy, it seems smart to get it before going, as opposed to after. Sure, it'll not have generated the maximum antibodies, but it's a start, and every little bit helps.

It looks like my new MacBook Pro is Out for Delivery today, and it could be a good day. 🙂 I'm planning on using Migration Assistant to move my User files and Settings, but not anything in /usr - which I have done in the past, but this time, I'm going to leave Homebrew installed on my Intel machine, and I'll just install the ARM-version of Homebrew once I get the laptop all set-up.

When I get it set up, I'll then install the ARM Homebrew, and then:

  $ brew install --cask temurin
  $ brew install leiningen
  $ brew install jq

And from there, I can set up nodenv and rvm... and then just work my way to getting back to running everything I need. Should be an interesting day or two... 🙂